Distribution or destination: What does your business model dictate?

Emily Bell,
Columbia Journalism Review,
June 2016
Tow Center research in 2016 found that as most platforms are becoming publishers, publishers are “experiencing a more rapid than expected shift in distribution towards platforms."

One of the most strategic questions to answer in your newsroom is whether you’re allocating resources “between building a destination and creating journalism that is distributed,” according to research by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism that examined how newsrooms were adapting to platforms.

“Business models dictate how organizations approach the dilemma. Publishers with an advertising-based model view social platforms as perhaps the only way to become sustainable. This ‘Hail Mary’ strategy of publishing as much as possible onto third-party platforms reflects the difficult state of the mobile advertising market for most publishers. Those with subscription strategies are very different. They see social platforms as a way to recruit new readers and turn them into paying subscribers, and are therefore more strategic in their posting patterns.”